Month: August 2012

The question, "which is better, vbCrLf, ContrlChars.CrLf, vbNewLine, ControlChars.NewLine, Environment.NewLine, ControlChars.NewLine, or vbNewLine?" is not a question you'd get in C#, since only Environment.NewLine is available. This is a question that only appears during VB.NET development.

Usually, nothing. They all return a carriage return followed by a line feed ("\r\n"). The last one, Environment.NewLine, is a little special and there is one case where it may return something different.

vbCrLf

vbCrLf is a carry-over from old-school VB days and, for the sake of veteran VB developers, was retained. It actually is a constant declared in the Microsoft.VisualBasic.Constants class, so it can be referred to as Constants.vbCrLf too. I wouldn't be surprised if this constant were eventually dropped in future versions of the VB.NET language. There's also another constant with the same value defined as ControlChars.CrLf. All will return the value "\r\n", indicating a carriage return (vbCr or "\r") followed by a line feed (vbLf or "\n"). In Windows, typically both are expected, even though sometimes you'll find folks using either one or the other and it is usually rendered correctly. However, I don't recommend the practice of using one or the other, or even the string "\r\n". Better to just let a predefined constant (like any one of the five mentioned in this article) to do the job. But like I said earlier, I suspect this constant is on its way out and will likely become deprecated and obsolete.

vbNewLine

vbNewLine (or Constants.vbNewLine) is identical to vbCrLf, just a little easier to understand for newer developers. It can also be referred to as ControlChars.NewLine. These constants also return the value "\r\n".

Downside of ControlChars.CrLf and ControlChars.NewLine

So it's established that vbCrLf and vbNewLine are identical to ControlChars.CrLf and ControlChars.NewLine, respectively. So although we've got four constants that all really mean the same thing (which is typically ill-advised, since any redundant code or constants are more costly to change later), the main drawback is that they are all VB.NET specific. Unless you import the Microsoft.VisualBasic reference to your C#, C++, or F# project, none of these constants are available in your code when working with non-VB.NET projects. These are all constants written solely for the convenience of the Visual Basic.NET developer.

Environment.NewLine

Environment.NewLine in my opinion is the most versatile and the one I recommend. Not only is it the only one of these five options also available in C#, making it the most universal, but it has the added benefit of being platform-independent. Well, at least it's intended to work in either Windows or Unix environments. In the case of Unix, there is no need for a carriage return, just a new line ("\n") character will suffice. So for compatibility between both platforms, this property (emphasizing here that it's a property and not a constant) will adjust and return either "\r\n" in Windows or simply "\n" in Unix.

The one downside is that it can't be used to define a constant; it's a read-only property, not a constant itself like the other options.

So to sum it up, all five options return the exact same value, except for Environment.NewLine, which can adapt to the platform on which your application is running. If you don't believe your application will ever run on another platform but Windows (but why limit yourself?) and you anticipate no possibility of ever using C#, then I would recommend at least being consistent and ensure your entire solution uses only one of these constants.